1828.] Welsh Jurisprudence. 473 
that the whole circuit business of the county, including therein equity, 
has to be settled. The entire sitting, however, of the court for actually 
dispatching the business of the session, at any one place, does not exceed 
four days, and, accordingly, it frequently happens that causes of the 
greatest importance—causes involving great nicety in the construction 
of the law, and the arrangement of the pleadings, or requiring the testi- 
mony of numerous witnesses in their elucidation, may have to be insti« 
tuted and decided within the space of those four days. On the other 
hand, if the want of preparation drive either party to the alternative of 
postponement to some future session (to say nothing of this not being 
always attainable), or, as must frequently happen, the limitation of the 
session equally prevents a decision, the delay becomes perhaps even 
more destructive than the previous scramble and confusion, so that, says 
Lord Cawdor, “ The general result of all this is, that where there is despatch 
in the Welsh courts (i.e. in new issues), it is, in almost every instance, 
harassing to the suitors, counsel, and solicitors ; whereas in old issues, 
or causes which have been commenced at a preceding sessions, six months 
have necessarily elapsed. In those instances in which causes are not 
tried till the second or third sessions, the delay is as great, or greater, 
than in England”—>p. 43. 
But it is in the equitable jurisdiction of the court that these opposite 
ingredients are most sweetly blended. Mr. Bentham, in his Rationale 
of Judicial Evidence, while with his usual quaintness, he alludes to 
“the Great High Court,” as “a sort of sloth, which, though at its own 
pace, keeps on crawling almost the whole year round,” describes “the 
little Welsh Equity Court, as-a sort of dormouse, that must generally 
sleep ten or eleven months of the year.” We confess, however, that 
when, after its long slumber, it does awake, it seems less like a dormouse 
than a giant refreshed with sleep—or a comet loosened from its orbit, 
for there never was any thing equal to the rapidity with which, when 
once in motion, it whirls itself through the whole Principality. Alluding 
to the “former practice of the court, to consider the legal jurisdiction 
as confined to the county in which the cause of action arose,” Lord 
Cawdor remarks, “ The equitable jurisdiction, on the contrary, was sup- 
posed to travel post, and to extend through the three counties, of which 
_ every circuit is composed ; so that a bill may be filed at one stage, 
_ answered at the next, and the case, perhaps, argued at the third; then 
a delay of six months, when the rapid proceeding commenced again,” 
p- 44. And truly it would appear, that if the suitors of the court ever 
osted with less than six horses, they could scarcely keep up with it ; 
ber Lord Cawdor relates in detail, and in a manner very illustrative, the 
case of a gentleman, who, at eleven o’clock in the morning, was served 
at his usual place of residence, with a writ to appear at Cardiff, forty- 
_ seven miles distant, on the same evening, and posted there accordingly” 
_ —we presume under fear of being committed for a contempt. 
The phenomenon of a court of justice sitting barely two months in 
the course of a year, did, however, attract the attention of the legisla- 
ture ; and to the long intervals between the sittings of the Court of 
Great Sessions, the act of 1824 also extended its care. But juris- 
prudential legislation is, in England, only a species of state quackery 3 
_ and the whole of this precious sample appears to be about as efficacious 
in its rernedies, as a quackish prescription for “ causing magnanimity 
and curing the stone,” which we remember to have met with in an early 
M.M. New Series —Vou. VI. No. 35. 3 P 
